The Airbnb Story Book Summary

Book Summary

15 min

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Brief Summary

Airbnb started out as a creative way for two poor designers to keep their expensive apartment, but it turned into a successful business adventure that has changed the hospitality industry forever.

About the Author

Leigh Gallagher is a well-known speaker and business news commenter and the senior editor-at-large at Fortune. She serves as the host of Fortune Live. She is the co-chair of the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit and Most Powerful Women Next Gen Summit. She manages Fortune’s 40 Under 40 multi-platform editorial franchises. She appears as a guest on several known shows such as MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relationships. From 2012-2014, she was a visiting scholar at the Business and Economic Reporting Program at the Arthur L Carter Journalism Institute at New York University.

Topics

Entrepreneurship

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Key Insights

Airbnb has completely changed the way people vacation.

Instead of crashing in a fancy hotel room in a new city, people opt to take over or even share other people’s oftentimes eccentric pads for the night, a week, or a month.

But, how did this concept come to be?

“It seemed silly to let a perfectly good apartment sit empty while I traveled when there were so many visitors to San Francisco in need of a place to stay, who wanted to experience a city as I preferred to: in a local’s home, outside the tourist bubble of a hotel.”-Leigh Gallagher

In “The Airbnb Story” by Leigh Gallagher you will learn the origin of this billion-dollar company that has reinvented the hospitality business.

How It All Started

In 2007, two poor designers, Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia were living in San Francisco struggling to pay rent on their $1,150 apartment.

With some creative thinking that they had both learned from the Rhode Island School of Design, they decided to rent out space in their apartment for people who were traveling to attend the Industrial Designers Society of America conference happening in San Francisco.

They created a deal that people could rent an air mattress in their apartment for $80 a night. They called this plan the AirBed and Breakfast. To gain the attention of attendees to the conference, they posted ads on design blogs.

Within a few days, they were booked. With quick success, they started brainstorming how they could take this further by helping others use their apartments to make money as well.

To get out the news of their project they first went to the South by Southwest festival in Austin and the DNC in Colorado in 2008.

In order to be taken seriously, the two designers hired Nathan Blecharczyk a coder and engineer.

Although they had a great team, it was hard for them to get people to open their homes to strangers. They decided to create ads on small local blogs in order to gain traction.

And, it worked! The ads fueled a buzz and a New York Times article was even written up. After that 800 people signed up for the service and 80 bookings were made.

The Cereal Marketing Stunt

The quick buzz suddenly died and the team knew they needed to do something in order to keep their success.

Because of their work at the DNC, they decided it would be clever to appeal voters by offering Obama O’s and Cap’n McCain cereals as breakfast at their bed and breakfasts. All they had to do was rebox cereal and sell their newly named product. They earned $30,000 with this cereal marketing stunt.

Paul Graham, a tech billionaire, was intrigued by the designer duo after their clever marketing stunt. He personally didn’t like the idea of the AirBed and Breakfast, but he admired their determination and clever thinking. He decided to offer them a three-month mentor period.

Graham encouraged the two to temporarily move to NYC, which is where most of their clientele lived. While living there, the designers worked on...